1 min read · 28 January 2010
2 min read · 26 January 2010
This week, science writer and Wired columnist Clive Thompson writes “in praise of obscurity,” observing that in social media, there may very well be a point of having too many followers -- a number he ballparks at “a few thousand.” Thompson uses Maureen Evans, a poet, as an example. Evans built up an audience by tweeting recipes and poetic observations -- “this coffee tastes of peonies and the inner blades of fresh green grass,” she tweeted this morning. She loved the community that developed around her when it numbered 100 people -- even when it reached 3,000. Yet once Evans had amassed a stunning 13,000 followers, the conversation abruptly
1 min read · 26 January 2010
It's hard to believe anyone would use the word “gyrate” to characterize anything relating to Bill Gates, yet a “spy” tells the New York Post that the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist was dancing on a banquette earlier this week at an after-hours Sundance Film Festival party -- and that his security “rushed him out the back door at 2 a.m,” after awestruck onlookers began snapping photos. According to the Post, Gates also told its spy he'd come to the festival to meet Kristen Stewart, the young star of the blockbuster film “Twilight” and a newer film showing at Sundance called “The Runaways.” (Good to know he has a healthy sense of humor.)
1 min read · 26 January 2010
2 min read · 26 January 2010
You might call 26-year-old Siqi Chen an accidental entrepreneur. The UC San Diego grad didn’t intend to be his own boss; he mostly wanted to do fun things for a cool Web development company. Indeed, after logging time at startups Webmetrics and Veoh Networks, Chen joined one of hottest startups to form in 2007, the San Francisco-based semantic search startup Powerset. (Most readers will recall that Powerset was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $100 million.) Then a side venture, a Facebook game he began developing in late 2007 called "Friends for Sale," changed his life. Almost overnight, the game became one of Facebook’s most popular applications. Suddenly Chen had enough cash in his pocket to quit Powerset, and start his own company with pal and fellow Powerset engineer Alex Le. Today, Chen’s now two-year-old startup, Serious Business, has grown more serious than its tongue-in-cheek name implies. It is backed by $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, it's competing for an opportunity that analysts now place in the billions of dollars, and its profitable business is being threatened by aggressive startups like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom, whose growth has far outpaced its own.
7 min read · 25 January 2010
1 min read · 22 January 2010
As VCs around the country schlep their way from pension fund to pension fund, family office to family office in search of commitments, another firm that had already closed on a whopping billion dollars has yet another $300 million to invest, according to SEC filings uncovered by the Earth2Tech blog. (Filings are here and here.) As Katie Fehrenbacher reports, Khosla Ventures now has one billion dollars for Khosla Ventures III, a traditional, stage-agnostic venture fund. His firm has an additional $300 million for Khosla Ventures Seed Fund for the highest-risk, presumably highest-reward investments.
1 min read · 22 January 2010
Beginning a couple of weeks ago, we began shining a light on some of the unknown stars who are adding much of the value to some of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies. Raanan Bar-Cohen easily meets that bar. "Media engineer" of Automattic, the Web development company best-known for its open-source blogging software WordPress, Bar-Cohen joined the company in May 2007. Since then, he has helped to negotiate its transformation from a small, venture-backed startup into a powerhouse in the online publishing world.
6 min read · 22 January 2010
MIT Professor Sandy Pentland says it’s possible to predict who will win business competitions based on the social signals they send, and he discusses how he is measuring the power of charisma in the newest edition of Harvard Business Review. In one experiment, says Pentland, executives at a party were outfitted with elaborate sensors that gathered data on their tone of voice, how they used their hands, and how closely they stood to other people, among other things. Pentland -- who directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab -- was looking for cues predictive of which executives at the party would win a business plan competition later that same week. As it happens, they were the most energetic executives of the group.
2 min read · 21 January 2010
